"Forced Repatriation" and "Resettlers" – Soviet ethnic Germans returned to the USSR after World War II. [citation needed] The NKVD took the lead role in the deportations via its department, the Chief Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internee Affairs (GUPVI). - Volume 8 Issue 2 - Abram Bergson The results of these West German efforts to trace the fate of those deported was detailed in a study by Kurt Böhme published in 1965 Gesucht wird, Sought After. Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. [3] Women and children were the exception and specific conditions were laid out for them. 1. The conditions that accompanied forced labor were often harsh and could be deadly. The Soviet government proposed the use of German labor as reparations in 1943, and raised the issue at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. [6][8] Stalin viewed these kind of people as enemies of the Party and he wanted them dealt with as enemies. Russian Wildcats. The latest value from 2020 is 72.3 million people. The workers were housed in concentration camps under armed guard. [6] The types of prisoners ranged from petty criminals to political prisoners. ed. On April 4, 1912, a strike formed by the laborers of the Lena Gold Field Company turned violent when an army detachment open-fired on the crowd. [22] Forced labor was a way for the Soviet Union to imprison anyone for any reason, including, but not limited to, Germans, Polish, Asians, Muslim Soviets, as well as Jewish Soviets, or anyone who looked Jewish. For example, the records of Pauline Gölner reveal that she was born in 1926 in Wolkendorf in Transylvania, was arrested on January 15, 1945 and sent to forced labor in the coal mines of Chanchenkowo (Ukraine). Romania — 75,000 German civilians were deported to the USSR and that 15% (10,000) did not return. Source of figures: Dr. Gerhard Reichling, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen, Teil 1, Bonn 1986 (revised edition 1995). [S]uch bad food that when I came to the concentration camp, I have seen prisoners which have only bones and skin. A study of German forced labor and expulsions by the West German researcher Dr. Gerhard Reichling was published by the Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen (Foundation of the German Expellees) in 1986. Forced labor camps for political and criminal prisoners continued to exist. They were held under favorable conditions they began to be released in 1950, the last returned home in 1958.[37]. As of 30 September 1964, the Search Service compiled information on 504,153 German civilians interned in the USSR (217,827 were still alive in 1964, 154,449 had returned home, 85,145 were reported missing, and 46,732 confirmed dead as forced laborers). Forced labor was used extensively in the Soviet Union as a means of controlling Soviet citizens and foreigners. [3], During the 1945 military campaign in Poland the Soviet Union interned suspected Nazi party members and government officials in camps in the Soviet-occupied areas east of the Oder-Neisse line. Law enforcement agencies in Russia took actions to combat child labor, including its worst forms. The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin’s long reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa./ Bearb. A selected few remained in the USSR until the early 1950s including German scientists who worked in the Soviet Union on the development of ballistic missiles, Helmut Gröttrup was among this group. Forced labour often affects the most vulnerable and excluded groups, for example commonly discriminated Dalits in India. [3] In July 1918, the Russian Constitution implemented Obligatory Labor Service which was to begin immediately. // Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland. In October 1946 the Soviet NKVD forcibly deported from East Germany "a few hundred" selected German experts to work in the USSR. [13], At least 6 million kulaks were starved to death by the deliberate policy of the communist state.[14]. Historians cite German accounts that cover the employment of German labor by the USSR. Labor force participation rate for ages 15-24 is the proportion of the population ages 15-24 that is economically active: all people who supply labor for the production of goods and services during a specified period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947. The Russian prison system is to reintroduce forced labor in 2017, the TASS news agency reported Tuesday. Finally, the authors would like to express gratitude to Ms. Lydia Grafova Gulags or Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerej, are described as labor camps which were a police-run system of colonies and special settlements. [2], By the summer of 1944 the Soviet forces had reached the Balkans that had ethnic German minorities. Then, in 1919, the Russian Labor Code laid out the exemptions such as the elderly and pregnant women and the requirements of obligatory labor to include that workers would be given the choice to work in their trades, if the option was available. [7] The Gulag penal system was isolated to the point where there was little or no communication allowed between the different camps, and no mention of the camps were discussed in the wider Soviet society. A. Deported from Former eastern territories of Germany and Poland for forced labor in the USSR - Over 400,000 civilians deported to USSR of whom they estimated about 200,000 died. The study estimated a total of 600,000 deaths caused by what they call "crimes and inhumanites" in the eyes of West German law, including 200,000 in forced labor in the USSR. Repatriation started as early as 1945 and almost all were released by 1950. 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